6 ms·

Is r/lockdownskepticism also skeptical of vaccination? And do you think covid is worse than or same as the flu?

yonaguska 5y ago
There is a definite overlap in people skeptical of lockdowns and the vaccines, but the sub tries to steer clear of vaccine skepticism due to it being technically off topic, and something that would get the sub nuked. Not that you asked me- I would classify it as "different" than the flu, that it affects different individuals differently, and that the original variant was definitely something more scary than the flu. Especially due to the novelty of the spike protein. Now- I view omicron as about as dangerous as the flu for a much smaller subset of people than the flu is dangerous for. Especially when you account for age and comorbidities. The flu kills children, while covid generally does not.
- unityByFreedom 5y ago
  - yonaguska 5y ago
    > given the rate of deaths are 10-20x worse than the worst flu years. I have a hard time accepting this premise. Mostly because the flu was somehow eradicated at the outset of mass covid testing, many of the covid tests did not distinguish between the flu and covid. Furthermore, I believe that we actually responded to covid in a way that caused excess covid deaths by over counting deaths and actively suppressing unpatentable treatments for covid. I think we hospitalized people that didn't need to be hospitalized, and we told people not to do anything until they needed to be hospitalized. We then started putting too many people on vents, giving them Remdesiver(toxic with highly questionable efficacy), and putting covid patients in nursing homes with the most vulnerable population. Not to mention lockdowns that pushed a huge portion of the world into poverty, nutritional deficiency, and much more susceptible to adverse effects from disease as a result. But those are just my thoughts- I don't think we have good enough data, nor will we ever- to actually make strong conclusions either way.
    - unityByFreedom 5y ago
      > the flu was somehow eradicated at the outset of mass covid testing, Did you know "the flu" is actually many strains, the most prevalent of which changes season to season? It is not surprising to me that Covid "won out" this season. Plus a record number of people got the flu vaccine during the pandemic. Here is what the CDC says about lower flu numbers [1] > many of the covid tests did not distinguish between the flu and covid. That's just not true. > lockdowns that pushed a huge portion of the world into poverty What would you do to mitigate the spread of a pandemic? [1] https://www.cdc.gov/flu/season/faq-flu-season-2020-2021.htm https://www.cdc.gov/flu/season/faq-flu-season-2020-2021.htm
      - yonaguska 5y ago
        Thanks for clarifying the flu details. As for lockdowns- hindsight is 20/20, but I would do the following- Issue public health advisory encouraging people to eat healthier, exercise, and possibly even offer subsidies on healthy groceries and vitamins. Vitamin D deficiency is highly correlated to negative outcomes with covid infection. To this day, our federal health organizations haven't even issued statements encouraging people to eat healthier or even do something simple and easy like address vitamin D deficiency. The messaging has been negligent at best. I would not engage in a fear campaign, and lock people inside. Most spread was occuring between family members confining themselves inside, and stress wreaks havoc on your immune system. We've been subjected to fear induced mass psychosis for the past two years, and as a result have acquired a learned helplessness when it comes to our personal health. I would also take steps to address to hospital staffing and capacity issues. In the USA, hospitals always run at near capacity, for financial reasons. Instead of refusing to upset that delicate balance game they play, incentives should have been put into to place to bolster staffing so that hospitals wouldn't be overwhelmed. Simply not using hospitals had the effect of killing many more people that were now missing early health screenings. I would have also liked to see only the most vulnerable be locked down, and only on a volunteer basis. A western, non authoritarian government, has no way to truly implement lockdowns effectively. Partial lockdowns have no benefits, since they didn't actually stop the spread of anything. Instead they caused irreparable harm where they were implemented with very little benefit. Basically security theater. I understand the original intentions, but the prolonged lockdowns, justified by poor metrics of "success" quickly became a political response instead of a scientific response. Lastly, outpatient clinical attempts at treating covid with repurposed existing drugs should have been prioritized. Trump's warp speed and prep act created insane incentives to actively hamper any attempts to treat covid except pharma approved methods. This whole response feels like the AIDS response all over again, except with more media coverage, widespread corruption, and money at play.
  - native_samples 5y ago
    "Worst" flu years must be quite selectively chosen. Clearly the Spanish Flu was much worse than COVID. If you go by age-adjusted excess mortality then most countries reached levels last seen about a decade ago, more or less. The UK for example I think was 'rolled back' to 2007/2008 levels of mortality, Sweden back to 2012. So 10x worse than worst flu years just doesn't seem right at all and I wonder where you got that stat. One thing that is clear is that the general population systematically over-estimates the severity of COVID by orders of magnitude. https://news.gallup.com/opinion/gallup/354938/adults-estimates-covid-hospitalization-risk.aspx https://news.gallup.com/opinion/gallup/354938/adults-estimat... There's a similar French poll out there, probably they exist for many countries. IFR estimates in these polls are wild, like 100x-200x higher than the correct values. So it's worth checking that you're familiar with the true numbers, as many people aren't, yet think they're well informed.
jMyles 5y ago
> Is r/lockdownskepticism also skeptical of vaccination? It's a very heterogenous sub, but I don't think you'll find the kind of anti-vax thinking that suggests that, eg, childhood vaccination is unhelpful to a society, if that's what you're asking. If you are asking more strictly about sentiment toward the currently available SARS-CoV-2 vaccines, I think that by and large we think they're a marvel of engineering, but have an array of assessments and opinions regarding pandemic-timeline vaccination, what it's meant to accomplish, and whether genuine public health decisions in such a context can ever be made independently of profit motivations of vaccine makers. As for the mod team, I think I can confidently say that we view the vaccines as very useful tools and owe the engineering teams (both who have worked these decades to make mRNA platforms a reality and those who lost sleep to crank these vaccines out) a debt of gratitude. > And do you think covid is worse than or same as the flu? By "the flu", I presume you mean the H3N2 influenza which began as the 1968 pandemic and has since been endemic, causing seasonal outbreaks most years, rather than epidemic influenza which of course happens from time to time (eg, the 2009 H1N1 pandemic). I don't think there's any remaining need to speculate: the wealth of evidence clearly demonstrates that COVID-19 is far more likely than seasonal influenza to result in hospitalization and death for the elderly with comorbidities, less likely than influenza to do so in young and middle-aged healthy people, and similarly likely as influenza for people in the middle. This has been evident, and has held true, since last summer, when John Ioannidis published this paper on the topic: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0013935120307854 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S001393512... I want to point out that opposition to lockdowns, almost without exception, does not turn on the population mortality rate of the pathogen in question. In fact, if the pathogen were even more dangerous, we suggest that lockdowns are likely to be an even worse idea. Lockdowns necessarily cause stratification by socioeconomic status rather than by risk. Even in an 'effective' lockdown, we still see spread among the "essential workers" who keep society going, and in their households, which are disproportionately likely to be multigen. To the degree that lockdowns actually slow spread, this means that people in the high-risk tier (in this case, mostly elderly people) have to isolate _longer_ to wait for the spread to complete among the lower risk tiers. This may be acceptable for affluent households with remote jobs and the ability to have all of their needs met via delivery, but is obviously untenable for our marginalized neighbors who cannot afford periods of extended isolation.

There is a definite overlap in people skeptical of lockdowns and the vaccines, but the sub tries to steer clear of vaccine skepticism due to it being technically off topic, and something that would get the sub nuked. Not that you asked me- I would classify it as "different" than the flu, that it affects different individuals differently, and that the original variant was definitely something more scary than the flu. Especially due to the novelty of the spike protein. Now- I view omicron as about as dangerous as the flu for a much smaller subset of people than the flu is dangerous for. Especially when you account for age and comorbidities. The flu kills children, while covid generally does not.

unityByFreedom 5y ago
- yonaguska 5y ago
  > given the rate of deaths are 10-20x worse than the worst flu years. I have a hard time accepting this premise. Mostly because the flu was somehow eradicated at the outset of mass covid testing, many of the covid tests did not distinguish between the flu and covid. Furthermore, I believe that we actually responded to covid in a way that caused excess covid deaths by over counting deaths and actively suppressing unpatentable treatments for covid. I think we hospitalized people that didn't need to be hospitalized, and we told people not to do anything until they needed to be hospitalized. We then started putting too many people on vents, giving them Remdesiver(toxic with highly questionable efficacy), and putting covid patients in nursing homes with the most vulnerable population. Not to mention lockdowns that pushed a huge portion of the world into poverty, nutritional deficiency, and much more susceptible to adverse effects from disease as a result. But those are just my thoughts- I don't think we have good enough data, nor will we ever- to actually make strong conclusions either way.
  - unityByFreedom 5y ago
    > the flu was somehow eradicated at the outset of mass covid testing, Did you know "the flu" is actually many strains, the most prevalent of which changes season to season? It is not surprising to me that Covid "won out" this season. Plus a record number of people got the flu vaccine during the pandemic. Here is what the CDC says about lower flu numbers [1] > many of the covid tests did not distinguish between the flu and covid. That's just not true. > lockdowns that pushed a huge portion of the world into poverty What would you do to mitigate the spread of a pandemic? [1] https://www.cdc.gov/flu/season/faq-flu-season-2020-2021.htm https://www.cdc.gov/flu/season/faq-flu-season-2020-2021.htm
    - yonaguska 5y ago
      Thanks for clarifying the flu details. As for lockdowns- hindsight is 20/20, but I would do the following- Issue public health advisory encouraging people to eat healthier, exercise, and possibly even offer subsidies on healthy groceries and vitamins. Vitamin D deficiency is highly correlated to negative outcomes with covid infection. To this day, our federal health organizations haven't even issued statements encouraging people to eat healthier or even do something simple and easy like address vitamin D deficiency. The messaging has been negligent at best. I would not engage in a fear campaign, and lock people inside. Most spread was occuring between family members confining themselves inside, and stress wreaks havoc on your immune system. We've been subjected to fear induced mass psychosis for the past two years, and as a result have acquired a learned helplessness when it comes to our personal health. I would also take steps to address to hospital staffing and capacity issues. In the USA, hospitals always run at near capacity, for financial reasons. Instead of refusing to upset that delicate balance game they play, incentives should have been put into to place to bolster staffing so that hospitals wouldn't be overwhelmed. Simply not using hospitals had the effect of killing many more people that were now missing early health screenings. I would have also liked to see only the most vulnerable be locked down, and only on a volunteer basis. A western, non authoritarian government, has no way to truly implement lockdowns effectively. Partial lockdowns have no benefits, since they didn't actually stop the spread of anything. Instead they caused irreparable harm where they were implemented with very little benefit. Basically security theater. I understand the original intentions, but the prolonged lockdowns, justified by poor metrics of "success" quickly became a political response instead of a scientific response. Lastly, outpatient clinical attempts at treating covid with repurposed existing drugs should have been prioritized. Trump's warp speed and prep act created insane incentives to actively hamper any attempts to treat covid except pharma approved methods. This whole response feels like the AIDS response all over again, except with more media coverage, widespread corruption, and money at play.
- native_samples 5y ago
  "Worst" flu years must be quite selectively chosen. Clearly the Spanish Flu was much worse than COVID. If you go by age-adjusted excess mortality then most countries reached levels last seen about a decade ago, more or less. The UK for example I think was 'rolled back' to 2007/2008 levels of mortality, Sweden back to 2012. So 10x worse than worst flu years just doesn't seem right at all and I wonder where you got that stat. One thing that is clear is that the general population systematically over-estimates the severity of COVID by orders of magnitude. https://news.gallup.com/opinion/gallup/354938/adults-estimates-covid-hospitalization-risk.aspx https://news.gallup.com/opinion/gallup/354938/adults-estimat... There's a similar French poll out there, probably they exist for many countries. IFR estimates in these polls are wild, like 100x-200x higher than the correct values. So it's worth checking that you're familiar with the true numbers, as many people aren't, yet think they're well informed.

jMyles 5y ago

> Is r/lockdownskepticism also skeptical of vaccination? It's a very heterogenous sub, but I don't think you'll find the kind of anti-vax thinking that suggests that, eg, childhood vaccination is unhelpful to a society, if that's what you're asking. If you are asking more strictly about sentiment toward the currently available SARS-CoV-2 vaccines, I think that by and large we think they're a marvel of engineering, but have an array of assessments and opinions regarding pandemic-timeline vaccination, what it's meant to accomplish, and whether genuine public health decisions in such a context can ever be made independently of profit motivations of vaccine makers. As for the mod team, I think I can confidently say that we view the vaccines as very useful tools and owe the engineering teams (both who have worked these decades to make mRNA platforms a reality and those who lost sleep to crank these vaccines out) a debt of gratitude. > And do you think covid is worse than or same as the flu? By "the flu", I presume you mean the H3N2 influenza which began as the 1968 pandemic and has since been endemic, causing seasonal outbreaks most years, rather than epidemic influenza which of course happens from time to time (eg, the 2009 H1N1 pandemic). I don't think there's any remaining need to speculate: the wealth of evidence clearly demonstrates that COVID-19 is far more likely than seasonal influenza to result in hospitalization and death for the elderly with comorbidities, less likely than influenza to do so in young and middle-aged healthy people, and similarly likely as influenza for people in the middle. This has been evident, and has held true, since last summer, when John Ioannidis published this paper on the topic: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0013935120307854 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S001393512... I want to point out that opposition to lockdowns, almost without exception, does not turn on the population mortality rate of the pathogen in question. In fact, if the pathogen were even more dangerous, we suggest that lockdowns are likely to be an even worse idea. Lockdowns necessarily cause stratification by socioeconomic status rather than by risk. Even in an 'effective' lockdown, we still see spread among the "essential workers" who keep society going, and in their households, which are disproportionately likely to be multigen. To the degree that lockdowns actually slow spread, this means that people in the high-risk tier (in this case, mostly elderly people) have to isolate _longer_ to wait for the spread to complete among the lower risk tiers. This may be acceptable for affluent households with remote jobs and the ability to have all of their needs met via delivery, but is obviously untenable for our marginalized neighbors who cannot afford periods of extended isolation.